For my parents
For Sarah
Copyright © 2016 by Nick Neely
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Neely, Nick, author.
Title: Coast range: a collection from the Pacific edge / Nick Neely.
Description: Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint Press,
[2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016020226
Subjects: LCSH: Neely, Nick. | BISAC: NATURE / Essays.
Classification: LCC AC8 .N35 2016 | DDC 979--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020226
Cover design by Debbie Berne
Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ebook ISBN 9781619028593
Contents
Chiton
The Book of Agate
The Afterlife
Discovering Anna
Gone Rogue, or Suck It Up
A Guide to Coyote Management
The Garden of Earthly Delights
The Carcass Toss
Chanty
Homestead
Slow Flame
Acknowledgments
Along my home California coast, you may find, on the softest littoral rock, an infinite number of subtle dimples. It’s as if, for eons, some ambitious soul lingered to rub first this spot, then that, until each became a smooth and nearly uniform divot. These shallow holes—catching seawater, reflecting sky and fog—are not the work of some invisible thumb, however, but of the foot of a five-hundred-million-year-old: a mollusk. They are the resting places of chiton.
Now the best way to understand a chiton (kī-tän) is to wait until sunset, flop on your belly at the sea’s rocky edge, and lie quite still. Make sure it’s high tide, when chitons are busiest. Then, with your ear pressed to the stone, you might hear the faint vibrations of scraping as, underwater, their rasp-like radulae rev up in their mouths and they begin to lurch forward to graze the algal fields, inch by inch. Some chitons reap “diatom scuzz”; others prefer a healthy leaf of algae. All cut with precision: The outermost “teeth” of their radulae are capped with magnetite, harder than stainless steel.
Chitons are also called “sea cradles,” because eight calcareous plates overlap across their backs, a defensive arch surrounded by a fleshy girdle. More than nine hundred species crawl the world’s shores, but they’re most varied on our West Coast (and in Australia). If you’re lucky, while perusing a Pacific tide pool you might chance upon a foot-long brick-red gumboot chiton, a creature lovingly nicknamed the “wandering meatloaf.” This giant’s leathery girdle actually wraps clear around its plates and is slightly fuzzy to the touch: Twenty species of red algae grow on its back. All of which makes me wonder if the gumboot wouldn’t enjoy nibbling on itself, just a little.
Chitons are guarded, territorial. They don’t like limpets, another grazer. They have light-sensitive organs, “aesthetes,” in their shells—their plates are innervated—which relay signals to the region resembling a head. Some even have lens-bearing “eyes” on their backs and see shapes. Thus, when your shadow crosses, a chiton will cling fast, masquerading as rock. Should you, or a wave, catch and flip a chiton upside down by surprise, however, it will curl into a tectonic ball and go with the flow, tumbling to safety.
But this is why it’s really worth lying on your stomach: Each night, some chiton species creep forward on established trails to their feeding grounds, usually no more than a few feet from their primary dimple. Out and back, they go, harvesting, and by morning return on these mucal routes to their hammocks in the stone, where they seal tight to conserve moisture. They perform these rounds for months before moving on to fresh algal pastures. Do you hear them? No one knows how they navigate, exactly, nor how they scour their pits (and some species don’t). Like limpets, their secretions may dissolve the stone, before they polish off the job with their teeth. But now, again, I find myself wondering: Is the chiton’s home its groove, equally a rut and a cradle? Or is it the endless forays made from this center?
Here, on my desk, lies a handful of beach agates, catching the winter light. They are charms I’ve given myself to play with. Comforts, pacifiers. Curiosities.
Some are smooth, buttery, worn round by water and time; others are angular and rough, perhaps removed too soon from their wash cycle.
But even these, I find, are easy on the fingers.
Recently these stones—mostly small, translucent pebbles—were lodged in the silt of a river delta, but now they are clean and dry, preserved for a spell. They’ve found a home.
Once an object joins a collection, it tends to become more than itself. Not just symbolic, but sacred. It is retired from all former use, if there was any in its previous incarnation.
Then even a stone snatched from the multitudes—one that’s caromed for thousands of years without much consequence—can no longer be handled so lightly.
Dropping one to the floor, I can’t help but wince a little.
Something collected recalls its many origins all at once: layers of association difficult to distinguish, let alone describe, amid that warm feeling of general owner’s satisfaction.
Holding up this milky pebble to look within, I seem to confront an immeasurable history compressed into an object.
Not just the white lines barreling in on the beach where this rock was discovered—waves that crash down even now, thousands of miles away—but also the eroded pocket in the hills from which it came and every scouring riffle in between.
Agates gather in darkness, in lava rock, where silica gradually precipitates from groundwater. In ancient bubbles and faults, a gel forms, and as it dehydrates, the incipient crystal separates into discrete but fused bands. Eventually, the emptiness of the cavity is filled with a seamless quartz known as chalcedony.
If a small cave is left at the center, then your agate is in fact a geode, a word that means “earthy,” though those glittering innards may seem